FACILITATING INTRA-OIC TRADE:
Improving the Efficiency of the Customs Procedures in the OIC Member States
1
AIMAND SCOPE
Trade Facilitation is one of the output areas of the trade component of the COMCEC
Strategy. In this specific area COMCEC is aiming at enhancing competitiveness of the
member states through enabling time and cost- effective trade transactions. Obviously,
reaching such an important objective requires the political will and implementation of
sound policies in the Member States. In this regard, COMCEC, as the multilateral
cooperation platform, is promising to play a facilitator role through COMCEC Trade
Working Group and COMCEC Project Funding. The COMCEC Trade Working Group,
meeting regularly twice a year, focuses on a specific topic in its each meeting with a
view to identifying common obstacles, exchanging experiences and success stories and
disseminating knowledge. COMCEC Project Funding complements the work of the
Trade Working Group and provides an opportunity to the Member States to receive
grants for their capacity building and technical cooperation projects.
The Third Meeting of the COMCEC Trade Working Group will be held on February
27th , 2014 in Ankara, Turkey with the theme of “Facilitating Intra-OIC Trade:
Improving the Efficiency of Customs Procedures”. This study is prepared with the
purpose of providing an input and to enrich the deliberations to be made during the said
meeting.
The study is structured on the assumption that simplifying trade procedures and
improving the capacity of the customs administrations has significant positive impact on
trade facilitation. This fact is already recognized by the international institutions
including WTO and WCO and by the COMCEC in its strategy. Therefore, the study
begins with introducing the concept of trade facilitation and tries to identify its
relationship with the customs procedures.
The main objective of the study is to identify the general status of some of the customs
procedures in the OIC Member States. To reach its objective it presents some of the
modern customs procedures as criteria which are brought by Revised Kyoto Convention
(General Annex), WTO Trade Facilitation and selected relevant agreements, standards
or recommendations of WCO, WTO and UNECE. In line with these procedures, the
study analyzes the situation in the Member States by reviewing the relevant provisions
of the aforementioned agreements, bilateral agreements, findings of some of the
theoretical and empirical studies, relevant indices, and customs websites have been
reviewed during preparing this study. The study ends with some recommendations for
the consideration of the Member States to address the problems faced in improving
customs procedures.